Identity Politics Applied To Outer Space

     Sure, why not?  Ever since the film Elysium made the heavy-handed point that the rich were going to head off to clean, well-planned sybaritic lives Innnnn Spaaace and leave the rest of us losers starving on this polluted, used-up ball of mud, it's been taken as a given in some circles.

     Here's why not: there's no air, water,* bacon, broccoli, caviar, bread, carpet, chairs, iPads, condoms, Sansabelt slacks, and so on and on and on.  There are no functioning ecosystems in space and to date, nobody's built one.  ISS recycles quite a lot of water and processes some air, but everything that's up there was brought up there.  Figuring out how to establish an even minimally-closed environment will be a long, slow process and people will die learning.  I doubt any of them will be millionaires.

     What's the use of being the richest man in the Solar system in a space suit at the end of a long supply chain?  Sitting on the Moon, twiddling one's silent-film-villain mustache and sneering down at the planet all your stuff has to be shipped up from?

     Not gonna happen.  About the time you can transport a Caribbean island paradise to the Moon, intact and with a good big hunk of the surrounding sea and all its life, maybe you'll start to see a plutocrat or two in space.  Maybe.

     It's not a refuge for the rich.  It might keep the human race from getting stomped flat by planetary disaster -- but we're going to need viable off-Earth settlements, and that's at least a century away.  It'll be even longer before the livin' is at all easy.
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* There's ice.  Given ice, sunlight and a whole lot of money and time, you can get most anything else -- eventually.  But it takes hands.  Working hands.  With all due respect to the accomplishments of Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk, it's not going to be their hands, it's going to be a bunch of people working for wages.